A Dish for the Gods & Sheepskin: Two Plays about Academic Life

A Dish For The Gods Julia Reynolds, a celebrated literary critic and media personality, hurries onstage to deliver a lecture. Before long, however, she finds herself unable to continue, and to help explain her predicament, she recalls events from her life. After dropping out of college, she returned to school in her late twenties and met Professor Greg Davidson, a classroom dynamo who soon appears onstage and thereafter moves in and out of her presentation. Subsequent scenes reveal how Greg inspired Julia to blossom intellectually, as well as how their personal relationship flourished. Soon, though, Julia faced great opportunities and profound choices, and the play dramatizes how the resolution of these issues determined the path of her life. Did she make the right decisions? Julia and the audience are left to wonder. A Dish for the Gods is a strong love letter to complex women. -reviewsoffbroadway.blogspot.com Sheepskin Sharon Sanders, a doctoral candidate in English, arrives at the home of Professor Wyatt Randall. He has just been appointed as a reader of her dissertation, the book-length project she has written to complete requirements for her degree. Initially he seems sympathetic, but when she returns to discuss the manuscript, his brutal criticism of her work shocks her. When he also implies that he expects sexual favors in exchange for his signature, she leaves in a fury. Not long after though, she returns, oozing flattery and flirtation that soon win him over. But before he can formally approve her manuscript, outside forces intrude, and Randall finds himself trapped between official procedures and his own shenanigans. The result is a comic portrait of male vanity, female manipulation, and the academic environment in which such exploitation may flourish.